One of the perks of parenthood, it is often said, is to relive the joys of one’s youth, to share with your child everything you once loved—especially books. Before I was a parent, I was skeptical of this idea, being generally suspicious of nostalgia and knowing memory to be a poor replica of reality. And, indeed, there are many things designed for children that, as an adult, rub the wrong way. Richard Scarry’s ubiquitous “Busytown” books, which I had remembered mainly for Lowly Worm and Scarry’s quaint drawings of paint tubes and cross sections of houses, are almost intolerably didactic, it turns out—focussed on shaming children into good manners and riddled with (canine) police. Other books suggest the violence once tolerated against children: in the poetic “Bedtime for Frances” (1960), by Russell Hoban, a badger is finally coerced into bed by the threat of a spanking. More recent entries forgo the tyranny of parenting styles past but fail to beguile children, giving them nothing to work through. The high-contrast cartoon board books that kids eat up today can feel like brain rot to the adults forced to read them, aloud, several times in a row.

Our family discovered “Sato the Rabbit,” by Yuki Ainoya, in much the same way that the series’ translator, Michael Blaskowsky, did: at the library, as one of many books hastily chosen with a small child in tow. In 2017, Blaskowsky and his wife, who then lived in Seattle, were searching for Japanese-language children’s books to read to their baby. The first installment in the Sato series—there are four—opens with a figure getting dressed in a white rabbit suit. “One day, Haneru Sato became a rabbit,” Ainoya writes. “He’s been a rabbit ever since. He likes stars, the ocean, and tasty treats. He likes lots of other things, too. What is Sato doing today? What is he going to do tomorrow?” What follows are several six- and eight-page stories. Sato’s costume is not quite a refusal of adulthood or a retreat to the animal world; his routines are deeply rooted in daily life. He bakes a blueberry cake, eats watermelon, sips milk before bed, and waters the garden. The seasons turn. The bugs go “Chirr chirrr chirrrr.” Several vignettes entail Sato sitting or lying on the ground.

The tone here recalls “Goodnight Moon,” which is content to let the reader take in a room, a drowsy atmosphere—but “Goodnight Moon” is meant to nudge children toward the final destination of sleep. Sato has no such drive or agenda. The rare time he goes to sleep for the night is after he retrieves the reflection of the moon from the surface of a lake, dries it by the fire, and wraps himself in it. The illustrations, also by Ainoya, are soft, impressionistic, and highly functional, showing Sato each step of the way. He never interacts with any other characters, though sometimes they appear in parallel, also decked out in animal suits.

The genius of the series lies not in plot or dialogue but in its treatment of the world of objects. Something that can be easily held in the palm of one’s hand—a walnut, say—grows over the course of a story until it becomes an entire cosmos in itself. “Sometimes the walnuts have especially wonderful things inside,” Ainoya writes— “shelves of delicious bread on one side, and fragrant hot coffee on the other,” or a “warm bath” and a “comfy bed.” “The insides of one walnut are as dark as a cave. / So he covers his eyes like this. / It’s pitch black at first, but after a little while . . . / it becomes a sky filled with stars.” On the final page of this story, Sato sits on the grass outside a giant walnut that has become a house. He cuts a watermelon in half and closes his eyes to savor the flavor. When he opens them, the halved watermelon is a boat, which Sato spends the afternoon munching and sailing. “There’s tons of little Easter eggs in there,” Blaskowsky told me. In “Watermelon,” he pointed out, a seagull on Sato’s spoon “becomes the seagull on the watermelon on the next page. It takes the eyes of a kid to notice all that stuff.”

Blaskowsky understood Sato’s magic immediately, and pitched a translation to Enchanted Lion, a children’s-book press based in New York. “If we are seeking to do anything,” Claudia Bedrick, Enchanted Lion’s publisher, told me in an e-mail, “it is to show and share the idea that magic, beauty, charm, surprise, whimsy, and the wonder saturated dimensions of life are not ‘surreal,’ but rather a part of the real and our interaction with the world itself.”

The Sato books encourage parents to meet their children where they are—in a space of focussed exploration—rather than relentlessly pulling kids toward adulthood through narratives that educate or pontificate. In fact, reading them in the bright quiet of morning, with an attentive child, feels like childhood itself. It feels like sitting on a swing, looking out into a park, and losing oneself in thought for a moment. Or like taking a long walk as it slowly grows darker and the temperature drops. In other words, the books stir not only the imagination but something more elusive: states of feeling. We parents often extol the virtues of boredom, but how often do we join in?

The Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov was published quietly in the Anglophone world for years before he won the 2023 International Booker prize with Time Shelter, about an Alzheimer’s clinic that recreates the past so successfully, it beguiles the wider world.

He is perhaps now Bulgaria’s biggest export. Ever playful, never linear, his new novel Death and the Gardener consists of vignettes of a beloved dying and dead father, told by a narrator who, like Gospodinov, is an author. Gospodinov has spoken publicly about losing his own father recently, and the novel feels autobiographical in tone. When we read “My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden,” it is not the beginning of an Archimboldiesque surrealist tale, but rather a more direct exploration of how we express and where we put our love.

It is harder to write about fathers than about mothers, the narrator says. “The father is a different sort of presence – shadowy, mysterious, sometimes frightening, often absent, clinging to the snorkel of a cigarette, he swims in other waters and clouds.” The book attempts a remedy, capturing a gentle man whose passion is his garden, and the grief of losing him. Odysseus and the biblical Joseph are used as examples of elusive fathers, but not ones without heart. The novel references the episode in Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus, after years away, watches his aged father, Laertes, tend to his garden, and this book is in a sense an expansion of that particular scene.

Death and the Gardener is also a rebuff to the kind of toxic patriarchal culture that flourished under communist rule. The narrator recalls the story someone told him of a classmate who, when asked by a teacher where his father works, replies “the slap factory”, one of the book’s both sad and funny anecdotes. Communist party officials destroy the narrator’s father’s too-tight trousers and make him cut his own hair and the “Beatles-like” hair of his young sons. The father’s life is one of poverty and lost dreams, but he “managed to turn every place into a garden, every house into a home”.

As the father ages and sickens, the narrator develops a love-hate relationship with his garden. He loves the “buzzing Zen of the bees”, its beauty, the way it is a declaration of love in a culture where “it is not customary to say things like I love you”, but he also thinks “there was some fatal connection, some Faustian deal, between them. I imagined it slowly sucking away his strength, feeding the fruit and roses within it, the rosier the cherries, tulips and tomatoes grew, the paler he became.”

We sit with the narrator in the hospital and at his father’s deathbed. Overwhelmed by medical language – “suspected propagation in the cerebrospinal canal” – he muses that “until now I had known that Latin was a dead language. Now I know that it is the language of death.”

As well as describing Bulgarian funerary traditions (eat boiled wheat by someone’s grave, and you will dream about them), the novel also captures how technology has changed our relationship to death. “After death the phone is a source of metaphysical horror.” A few days after his father’s funeral, the late man’s mobile phone rings. A voice on the line says, “Hey Dinyo, hope you’re not sleeping…” We are told of a woman who buries her dead husband with his phone, only to have it ring her a few days later. “I was scared, then I decided to call him back and he didn’t answer.” The narrator, too, keeps almost accidentally calling his father before remembering.

There are some cliches, and the luxurious jetsetting of the narrator grows tiresome, but the occasional slip is easily forgiven in such a warm and melancholic writer – the kind who also remarks, “I wonder whether flowers aren’t covert assistants to the dead who lie beneath them, observing the world through the periscope of their stems”. The book is endlessly quotable, and the narrator’s travel bragging is put into an empathetic context by the lack of travel allowed to Bulgarians under the Soviet regime. He tells us of his father’s one trip abroad to Finland, a reward from his agricultural collective for good work. The amount that Bulgarians are allowed to spend there is limited by the Communist party. Another man on the trip smuggles extra spending money, hiding it in hand-rolled cigarettes. In a fit of excitement over finally getting to travel, he accidentally smokes it.

“I have had relationships with humans, but I’ve also loved a lot of people in stories,” Sayaka Murata, the Japanese author of the bestseller Convenience Store Woman, confides a few minutes into our interview. “I’ve been told by my doctor not to talk about this too much, but ever since I was a child, I’ve had 30 or 40 imaginary friends who live on a different star or planet with whom I have shared love and sexual experiences.”

It is 7pm in Tokyo, mid-morning in London. Sitting upright at a desk in an empty publisher’s office, the 45-year-old author – wearing a cream silk blouse and with a neatly curled bob – might be reading the news rather than discussing imaginary friends. For context, her latest novel to be translated into English, Vanishing World, depicts a future in which people no longer have sex and the main character carries 40 “lovers” – plastic anime key rings – in her black Prada pouch. Our conversation is made possible thanks to the skilful translation of Bethan Jones, who relates Murata’s long, thoughtful and utterly unpredictable answers. As video calls go, the experience is so otherworldly the three of us might be beaming in from different planets.

Murata is the author of 12 novels, although most readers outside Japan will know her for Convenience Store Woman, her 10th, and the first to be translated into English, in 2018. A convenience store or konbini seems an unlikely setting for a global cult hit, yet this eerily unsettling novel about 36-year-old Keiko Furukura, who has worked in the Smile Mart since she graduated and has never had a romantic relationship, has sold more than 2m copies and been translated into more than 30 languages. It won Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa prize in 2016, when Vogue Japan named Murata a woman of the year. The book’s success helped spark the recent boom in Japanese fiction in translation, paving the way for predominantly female writers including Mieko Kawakami (Breasts and Eggs), Asako Yuzuki (author of last year’s bestseller, Butter) and Hiromi Kawakami (Under the Eye of the Big Bird, shortlisted for this year’s International Booker prize). “I never imagined that so many people would read it in Japan, let alone in other countries,” Murata says now. “It explores some quite unique aspects of Japanese culture.”

Reading Murata’s novels is not unlike finding yourself in a 24-hour store in an unknown city: everything is both familiar and exotic, orderly yet disquietingly unnatural and out of time. All the absurdities and cruelties of a sexist, consumerist society are revealed to be as artificial as candy under fluorescent lighting. Then there is the disorienting queasiness of her moral lens, like a security camera in the corner, recording everything without judgment. “What a lot of hassle,” Keiko reflects, watching her sister try to soothe her baby, before glancing at a cake knife. “If it was just a matter of keeping him quiet, it would be easy enough.”

Yet readers all over the world have identified with her endearingly offbeat heroine, who has been interpreted as being neurodivergent or autistic, although that wasn’t the author’s intention. “It feels like a lot of people see her as a friend,” Murata says. “She manages to express a part of themselves.”

She describes Convenience Store Woman as her “least triggering” novel. “There are no scenes of cruelty, there’s no sex, Keiko doesn’t kill anyone.” The rest of Murata’s work is darker and weirder, continually questioning social norms. Why is it more barbaric to eat a dead body than to burn it? Is the family the only way to bring up children? Wouldn’t marriage be simpler without love? “What about the real world? Where the hell is that anyway?” a character asks in the title story of her most recent collection, Life Ceremony.

Vanishing World was published in Japanese in 2015, before Convenience Store Woman, and is her third novel to be translated into English (all by Ginny Tapley Takemori), after Earthlings in 2020, about a girl who believes she is an alien. It poses another darkly comic thought experiment – what’s the point of sex when you could just have IVF? In Murata’s pristine speculative future, love is disappearing and “primitive copulation” is considered dirty. “The very idea of a married couple having sex, it’s horrifying!” one character exclaims. “The human race has advanced,” we are told. Men can give birth from synthetic wombs and children are raised collectively. Everyone is a “mother”.

Murata herself considers marriage to be “a kind of hostage situation” and motherhood “a curse” that would put an end to her life as a writer. Much of her writing involves imaginative attempts to resolve the biological fatalism of being female with humanity’s need to procreate. Her outlandish near-future fictional worlds are all rooted in the reality of Japan’s declining birth and marriage rates, an increase in young people choosing celibacy, not to mention deeply entrenched misogyny.

For many, Murata has become a left-field feminist icon. “Feminism is desperately needed in Japanese society today,” she says, describing “a hell soup” in which fathers have been given lenient sentences for raping their daughters and feminists receive death threats. “Some say that the worlds I write about are dystopian, but a lot of people think that actually reality is worse.”

Vanishing World grew out of a short story, A Clean Marriage, published in English in Granta magazine in 2014, about a couple who choose a “Clean Breeder” contraption in order to conceive because they prefer not to have sex – although they do with other people. Many readers responded saying it portrayed their ideal relationship.

In Japan, thanks largely to the popularity of manga and anime, what Murata calls “ficto-sexual” attachments or relationships are not so unusual, she says. For a long time she couldn’t imagine having sex with another human being. “I’ve often felt love, obsession, desire, friendship, a kind of faith, or almost a prayer-like relationship with these men – and they’ve always been men, so it’s a heterosexual relationship – who live inside stories,” she explains. A lot of her friends have experienced similar feelings, she says. “With Vanishing World I was trying to create a place where it might be easier for people who find it difficult to live in this world.”

Murata has always found it difficult to live in this world. As a child, all she wanted was to be normal. “I wanted to blend in. I wanted not to be a foreign object,” she says. “Now, I think that is frightening.” Since she started writing 20 years ago, all her work has been an attempt to answer the question: “what is normal and what is abnormal?” she says. “But the more I’ve experimented with it, the more unstable the boundary has become. I started to think that normality itself is a kind of insanity.”

Murata grew up in a small city in Chiba, a prefecture east of Tokyo, in the 1980s. Her parents had an arranged marriage and very traditional values. Her father was a judge, her mother, now 79, a housewife. It was not a happy childhood. “It looked good from the outside,” she says, “but now I think that I was starved of love, and that my brain was numbed and anaesthetised. But I was able to play the role of a normal girl. To this day, I think that my ability to get angry broke as a way of protecting myself.” Unsurprisingly, mothers don’t come out well in her fiction. In Vanishing World, Amane feels “the sticky fingerprints” of her mother’s soul all over the house and “an intense urge” to throw up after eating her cooking.

From a very young age, Murata never thought of her body as her own. “The grownups would always talk about whether Sayaka had childbearing hips,” she recalls. “It was almost like they were keeping an eye on my uterus, which was something that existed not for me, but for them, for the relatives.” No matter how much she tried to resolve the conflict of motherhood in her fiction, she has never escaped “this idea of being expected to reproduce for the good of the village”.

She found erotic magazines hidden in her older brother’s bedroom. “It was all over the place,” she says of the culture at that time; even the manga comics aimed at young girls involved the characters being forced to take their clothes off. “So I didn’t think of sexual love as something that I could choose for myself,” she says. “I always thought of my body as a tool for men to relieve their sexual desires.” Looking back, she endured “a lot of unpleasant sexual experiences”, including rape, some of which she was unable to recognise for what they were. “I hadn’t realised that I was abused, that I was a victim, or that I was crushed by the way that my mum spoke to me,” she says. “I’ve survived, I think, by forgetting.” She also survived by writing stories. From the age of 10, writing became the one place where she could express all these feelings.

As a student at Tokyo’s Tamagawa University, studying for a degree in art curation (combining art, music, literature and theatre), she started work at a convenience store. She then worked in a succession of similar konbinis, like Keiko, for another 18 years. There she was able to forget her gender for the first time. Unlike her only other job as a waitress, where she was told to wear makeup and behave in a certain way, in the convenience store men and women wore the same uniform and did the same job. “No one said anything if you showed up one day with no makeup,” she says. “It was almost like I wasn’t a woman, I was just a convenience store worker. I was just a kindly vending machine.”

She would wake at 2am and write until 6am before starting her shift, then she would go to a cafe when it finished at lunchtime and write all afternoon. To begin with, it never occurred to her to write about the store itself. But then she realised that this too was a vanishing world, with self-service tills replacing workers. “Suddenly I thought: I need to write about this now, the role that it plays in society, the functions it fulfils. I need to capture this moment.”

Murata only gave up working in the store in 2017, but her routine hasn’t changed much since. She still lives in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo, where she moved as a student. To escape the storytelling in her head and her “incredibly messy” apartment, she prefers to work in cafes. She needs to hear the sound of people around her, and often moves from one cafe to another. Sometimes, she goes for a walk in the nearby Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden, before taking the tube home. “It’s a very boring routine.”

Murata still occasionally finds it a struggle to be what she calls an “ordinary earthling”. She suffers from bouts of dysautonomia and vertigo. After becoming fixated on killing an established male editor she calls Z-san, who she felt was a bully who abused his power, she ended up in hospital. She wrote about the ordeal, in an untranslated essay published in Shinchō magazine in 2022, titled The Commonplace Urge to Kill.

She certainly doesn’t think of herself as an internationally famous novelist. She was once taught to think of writing as sheet music, with readers playing the notes. “But the music isn’t mine,” she says. “I’m happy if there are a lot of people performing this music and that gives me the motivation to keep writing.”

Is she happy more generally? “Hai!” she replies so emphatically it doesn’t need translating. “Yes, I am very happy. I am surrounded by things I love and I am now able to talk about things that I had kept hidden. I can say I am blessed.” Then she says thank you and goodbye in English, and that it would be lovely to meet in the real world one day. Where the hell is that anyway?

Michael Donkor, 39, was born in London to Ghanaian parents. His first novel, Hold (2018), about three teenage girls, was listed for the Dylan Thomas prize and the Desmond Elliott prize. His second, Grow Where They Fall, follows Kwame, a secondary school teacher, which was Donkor’s own job until his recent move to Lisbon, where he now works as a bookseller.

Where did this book begin?
I’d had some experiences – some challenging, some comic – of being in incredibly white environments, and I wondered whether a novel might be a place to think through those experiences. It wasn’t that after publishing Hold I just woke up and was like, OK, now I’m going to write the book about me. Nothing Kwame goes through specifically happened to me. He’s more someone I wished I’d had around in those racially vexed moments when I felt uncertain about what was going on in a room. I thought of him as the person I wanted to see when the headteacher was in the staff room saying: “Oh, we need to do more stuff about Black history,” and I could sense people looking at me. I’d desperately wanted someone to lock eyes with and be like, “This is weird, isn’t it?”

Did your work as a teacher give you a fund of material for fiction?
Making Kwame a teacher felt a slight risk because I worried I wouldn’t know how to use my knowledge in a way that wasn’t just me writing polemic: “I’ve been teaching for over a decade at three different places, let me tell you what I know…” I could write another two whole novels about that! I was keen to show the ordinariness of the exchanges between Kwame and his students. In the political conversation about education, there’s little attention paid to the real human work – what it costs for a person to wake up at 6am and finish at 8pm after marking and to have more than 100 conversations every single day.

What led you to the book’s matter-of-fact candour about gay sex?
Sometimes in queer novels there’s a titillating quality; I wanted the sex to feel sexy but I didn’t want people rubbing their thighs. Did I sense my teacherly responsibilities or the attitudes I suppose my students might have reading a novel where Mr Donkor’s written about willies and cum and stuff? I don’t know how I managed this, but honestly, when I sit down to write, I forget everyone else: it’s just me, the characters and the 500 words I’ve set myself to tackle.

In writing a big social novel full of dialogue, did you feel like you were working against the trend for more interior, fragmentary novels?
I really admire Deborah Levy and Rachel Cusk but much as I enjoy flintier stuff, I also enjoy a good yarn: the sort of novel where you think, I’m going to be held in a close embrace for 400 pages in a world that is very fully described. I really like novels where there’s a sense of the narrator being conversational. That doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily in slang or dialect – it’s about creating a voice that is inviting and feels like someone is speaking the novel to you. When I’m writing I read my work aloud a lot; I want it to sound as if you’re mid-conversation rather than something distant and arch.

Name a novel you’ve enjoyed recently.
Something I’ve been recommending in the bookshop where I work is Constance Debré’s Love Me Tender. I love its gutsiness: how she can be the sort of mother she wants to be, and how she can mother herself as she goes through this transitional moment of fully embracing her queerness, were questions I found really compelling. And the sex was fun and direct: “No need to be nervous but, yes, I’m going to talk about my dildo now.” I also loved Vladimir [by Julia May Jonas], for its wildly unpredictable over-the-topness and astute understanding of the negotiations involved in long-term relationships.

How come you left London for Lisbon?
It was a post-pandemic, let’s-do-something-adventurous decision. We came in July 2022. My husband and I got married here six years ago and we know the city quite well. People ask me: “Is it really creatively inspiring? Are its colours making you think in new ways?” I’m like, I dunno; so far I only know what it’s like to edit a novel here! Among the English-language community there’s definitely a developing creative writing scene. There’s this huge influx of British and American people and lots of them have creative ambitions. People from San Francisco and Stoke Newington tell me they’re in the middle of writing their Lisbon novel. So I would not be surprised if there’s a new kind of genre in the next five years, the Lisbon expat novel – it’s coming, I think.

Tell us about a novel you remember reading as a child.
I was about 11 the first time I read a novel about Ghana: Comfort Herself, by Geraldine Kaye, who was actually a white woman. It’s about a British-Ghanaian girl in Ghana for the first time. She doesn’t like the food, she’s confused about the values of the place and thinks her grandmother’s really harsh; then her relationship with this place that she’s from, but didn’t feel like she was from, develops and softens. I experienced the thrill of reading something and thinking, “I’ve been there, it is like that!” As I’ve gotten older, that magic of representation has a slightly different quality. The question of representation feels more nuanced for me now – it needs to be more than: “Let’s write a documentary-type novel about what it means to be Black.” I want more specificity: to say something new or different to make us reconsider what we think we know about Black experience.